Last week, Twitch CEO Dan Clancy announced the interactive entertainment and gaming platform planned to lay off just over 400 employees. This is part of Amazon’s latest round of layoffs, which will cut another 9,000 jobs, for a grand total of 27,000 layoffs since November. Twitch is part of the fallout.

Clancy shared the news with employees, just four days in the CEO seat, reports GeekWire. He replaces former CEO Emmett Shear who led the company for 16 years. Shear will stay on as an advisor to Twitch.

“Our mission at Twitch is to empower communities to create, together. You rely on us to give you the tools you need to build your communities, stream your passions safely, and make money doing what you love. We take this responsibility incredibly seriously and sometimes need to make extremely hard decisions to ensure we protect our business in order for Twitch to be around for a long time,” Clancy wrote in a March 20, 2023 blog post.

It’s not all fun and games

“Like many companies, our business has been impacted by the current macroeconomic environment, and user and revenue growth has not kept pace with our expectations. In order to run our business sustainably, we’ve made the very difficult decision to shrink the size of our workforce,” said Clancy.

What is Twitch?

Twitch is a lot of things, and if you haven’t used it, it isn’t obvious what to do or where to start. Twitch describes it as a place “where millions of people come together live every day to chat, interact and make their own entertainment together.” People join streaming platform Twitch to play games, share music, watch content, tell stories and connect with other Twitch users.

According to Geekwire, Twitch is the “dominant livestreaming platform,” and it became even more popular after Microsoft shut down Mixer in June 2020. Twitch reports that, in 2022, more than 11 million people choose to stream for the first time on Twitch. The company shared the following statistics:

• 1.3 trillion minutes watched in 2022
• 31 million average daily visitors
• 7 million unique streamers go live every month
• Twitch content broadcasts live content in 35 languages.
• More than 70% of viewers are between the ages of 18 and 34.
• In 2022, streamers earned over $1 billion.

What Twitch planned for 2023

In a January 25, 2023 blog post by chief product officer Tom Verrilli and chief monetization officer Mike Minton said his team’s focus is to create tools and features that make it easy for members of the Twitch community to create content. The monetization team helps streamers of all sizes earn revenue doing what they love. They announced some very specific changes they had planned for the year. There is no word yet on which, if any, of these initiatives will be impacted by the job cuts.

“Our main focus for the year is your growth — both for your communities and for your earnings on Twitch. In the first half of 2023, we’re launching products and tools that make it easier for you to earn without impacting growth, while also improving many of our existing products by expanding their capabilities so they can work harder for you,” Verrilli and Minton said.  

Here is an overview of some of the things Twitch planned for the year:

• Giving users more options to learn
• New tools that reduce the effort to promote their stream on and off Twitch
• Updating the Ads Incentive program to make it easier and more flexible to use
• Improving how and where ads appear on Twitch
• Improving the Guest Star feature
• Creating first party tools to “better celebrate viewers”
• Give Twitch users better insights into what’s working and what isn’t
• Helping users recognize and connect with their communities, on and off Twitch
• Continuing to improve opportunities for discoverability

“We love seeing what you can do when you’re enabled and empowered. We’re launching these features and tools because we want you to be able to build the communities you want to build, more easily and more reliably,” said Verrilli and Minton.

Insider Take

These job cuts are part of a larger layoff – Amazon’s third since November. The March 20 blog post at least explained why, while other Amazon divisions won’t, or haven’t, taken the same opportunity to explain the cuts. Like all the other layoffs, the CEO said the decision wasn’t made lightly, and they are sorry to say goodbye to their colleagues. What remains up in the air is how the 400 job cuts will impact the overall Twitch experience, and if Twitch will have to back off some of their plans for the year.